Slimmed-down Miles eyeing bounce-back season with Raptors

Josh Lewenberg

TSN Raptors Reporter

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TORONTO – There were moments last season when Raptors sharpshooter C.J. Miles feared he might be cursed.

It felt like it was one thing after the next.

In late December he needed multiple dental surgeries to treat an infected wisdom tooth that prevented him from eating solid foods for nearly a week and ultimately cost him three games.

About a month later, a knee ailment knocked him out of another three contests. He had missed a game earlier in the season with a shoulder injury, and then missed another two in March after coming down with a mysterious illness that lingered.

Even the birth of his first child, daughter Ava, in November – a blessing during an otherwise trying debut campaign in Toronto – cost him two games and, as most new fathers can relate, many hours of sleep.

The end result was an up-and-down season for Miles. It’s not that he was bad, exactly. Ten points in 19.1 minutes per game, while shooting the three-ball at a respectable 36 per cent clip, is right on par with his career numbers. Still, he didn’t quite live up to the lofty expectations he had for himself, or the team had for him, and you could see it wearing on the veteran swingman throughout the year.

“Getting to a point where [you] feel like what you had wasn’t enough was hard [for me],” Miles told TSN in a wide-ranging interview from Raptors training camp last week. “I feel like I could’ve been better. I could’ve done so much better. And that’s something I can only fix in the off-season. It’s hard to fix that in the season because you have to play games. Last year I was trying to train like I train in the summer and also play games to catch up, and then that became a domino effect too with all the little stuff.”

“And then the baby came, and then the dentist came. It was just weird. And I think my body broke down because of that. I had so much load on my body trying to make sure that I could get ready for the playoffs. And I was able to come out of it some and have a decent playoffs, but I want to be the best I can be to help my teammates.”

Many of the ailments that bogged him down last season may have been unavoidable. The dental issue, the flu – those things happen. But even after 13 years in the league, Miles is still learning things about his body. His most recent lesson: control what you can control and hope that those little things fall in line.

A year ago, Miles came to camp out of shape, relative to the team’s revamped strength and conditioning mandate. As part of the Raptors’ behind-the-scenes ‘culture reset,’ they put a greater emphasis on tracking body fat. They gave each player a goal: to get and stay under 10 per cent body fat by the end of camp, a target that all but one of them reached. Miles was the lone exception.

It’s impossible to know how much Miles’ preseason conditioning factored into some of the setbacks that would follow, if at all. But his disappointing season was all the motivation the 31-year-old needed to approach this past summer differently. Control what you can control. And he did.

“I experimented with some stuff, especially after last year with injuries and things like that,” Miles said. “Just continuing to try and crack my body’s code, trying to figure out what exactly are the best things for me. And that changes over time, as you get older. When you’re younger you’re invincible, you do a lot of things, and there are some things as you get older you might have to do [differently]. It was just continuing to try to find ways to get better and challenge myself.”

When Miles had his physical before camp a couple weeks ago he came in at eight per cent body fat – among the lowest marks on the team. He’s nearly down to seven per cent now. He weighed in at 222 pounds, almost 15 fewer than last year..

Of course, this is the time of the year when just about every player claims to be in the best shape of his life – those who needed to lose 15 pounds have lost them and those who needed to gain 15 pounds have gained them. However, Miles’ transformation is plain to see. He’s almost unrecognizable.

“He really did work hard,” said Raptors head coach Nick Nurse. “He just looks younger and fresher and bouncier, right? He looks five years younger to me than he did a year ago. I think that's always good.”

“I feel great, man,” Miles said. “I feel strong. I feel ready. That was the biggest thing, just to be ready. I wanted to come into camp and I wanted to have more… everything. I wanted to be able to use all the tools I have – the athleticism to be able to shoot the ball, to be able to move, run, jump. I wanted to just be ready to do anything I was asked to do.”

So how did he do it? 

Miles spent most of the summer training in San Antonio (he actually ran into Danny Green the day before the former Spur was traded to Toronto with Kawhi Leonard – purely coincidental, the two rarely bump into each other). 

He would get up at 6:00 a.m. every morning, go to the gym and start the day with strength and conditioning drills, followed by his on-court skills workout. He’d get home around lunchtime and tag in for his wife, Lauren, who would go do her workout while he took care of Ava for the afternoon. 

After a couple of hours hanging out with his daughter, and maybe squeezing in a quick nap – while she napped too, of course – he would return to the gym and get a few more hours of conditioning in. You could see a lot of it on his social media throughout the summer. He went hard.

He didn’t make a conscious effort to drop the weight or tone his body, he says. That came naturally with the work, but it’s an added bonus.

Both physically and mentally he’s in a much better place, and after the initial adjustment any first-time parent has to make he’s found a healthy work-life balance entering the new season. 

So far, Miles has been an early standout in camp. He’s one of the first two or three names Nurse mentions every time he’s asked who’s surprised him in practice. Miles has started Toronto’s first two preseason games as a small-ball four, although he may just be a temporary fill-in for OG Anunoby, who’s away from the team for personal reasons.

He made a strong impression in Saturday’s opener, a 122-104 win over Portland, scoring nine points in 15 minutes. While his shot wasn’t falling in Tuesday’s 105-90 loss to Utah, he blew by two Jazz defenders, got up in a hurry, and threw down a one-handed dunk in the fourth quarter. It’s not the type of play you expect to see from Miles, who is mostly known as a spot-up shooter, at this stage of his career.

However, Miles wants Raptors fans to know there’s more to his game than just three-point shooting – at least there was before he came to Toronto. He’s truly become one of the league’s elite shooters, hitting his threes at an impressive 38 per cent rate on high volume over the last six seasons. But he recalls being more of an all-around, two-way player in Indiana, where he played for three seasons before signing with the Raptors last summer. He would defend multiple positions, take charges, put the ball on the floor and be more of a vocal leader. 

Those are things he intends to – and feels better equipped to – reintegrate into his game. Doing so would go a long way in shoring up his role in Nurse’s crowded rotation. The addition of Leonard and Green, along with Miles and fellow holdovers Anunoby and Norman Powell, gives the Raptors even more depth on the wing. Minutes may be tougher to come by this season. That said, Nurse plans to play small often, and sharing the court with the former Spurs – both excellent shooters – could help create more space on the perimeter, where Miles had defenders draped all over him last year.

Regardless of how Nurse ends up deploying him or what they ask him to do, Miles is confident that he’s ready to deliver at a high level. He knows what it feels like to let himself down and he’s been on a mission to ensure that doesn’t happen again.

“I’m ready,” he said. “I’m in shape, playing great basketball in camp. Camp’s been great – competing on every possession, both ends of the floor. I take pride in being able to do whatever I’m asked to do as a basketball player. That’s who I’ve been. Last year I didn’t feel I was able to do that.

“That hurt me more than anything. I went into the summer [thinking], ‘I’m not going to be that person again.’ When I came back, two weeks or so before camp started, it was apparent. I wanted to walk in the gym and people would say, ‘Is that C.J.?’ That’s what I did.”